What Your S.E.O.
Strategist Won’t Tell You
By Jerry Bader (c) 2007

Maybe you own your own business, or perhaps you’re a critical cog in the corporate machinery responsible for marketing your company, brand, product or service. If that describes you, here’s eighteen things you need to know about Web-marketing but were afraid to believe.

1. Time To Be Heard
Your mother told you ‘children should be seen and not heard,’ but you’re not a kid anymore. So why are you listening to all those guys telling you not to use audio on your website. If you want to deliver a lot of content that people will remember, try letting your website do the talking.

Audio and video both are powerful media for any website. You don’t want to overdo it, but a good video or audio podcast can be very effective in selling your website.

2. There’s Nothing Like the Real Thing
In a world of virtual everything there’s nothing like the real thing. The sound and image of real people delivering your marketing message makes it a believable, memorable presentation.

3. Unlock the Conventional Wisdom Straightjacket
Driving traffic to your site is great, if those visitors stay long enough to find out why they should be doing business with you. If your website traffic is leaving as fast as it’s arriving, maybe search engine optimization isn’t the answer you’ve been looking for.

Stand out. Be different. Use the medium for what it is. It’s a tool and if used correctly can be a powerful tool for your business. Make it do it’s job.

4. Linking Your Way To Obscurity
You know the reciprocal linking strategy everyone is talking about as a way to generate leads? Did you ever consider that each link to another website is an invitation to leave your site? Is that really what you want - to invite people to leave? I think not!

Uh, do you really have to be told this? Keep people on your site. Then close the sale.

5. Your Company’s Voice Is It’s Personality
Give your company a professional voice, with a finely crafted script delivered by a professional voice-over announcer that presents a compelling, memorable marketing message and a unique brand personality. Or do it yourself and sound like an amateur. The choice is yours.

Actually, you can do it yourself and make it sound professional. But be prepared to work hard.

6. Addressing Ass-backwards Priorities
If your website design firm is twisting your marketing message out of shape to conform to the technical ‘technique du jour’ that only looks good in one popular browser, then you hired the wrong guys. It’s not about technology; it’s about communication.

Technology is a stumbling block. Don’t get hung up on it. The Web is all about two things: Content and Links. How you utilize both determines your success or failure. Make these two items work together and you’ll be a powerful force.

7. Text-Ads Are Dead. Long Live Web-Video
Squeezing your marketing message into a pay-per-click text-ad is like trying to attract leads using one of those newspaper real estate ads where every word needs to be decoded. Start communicating with a Web-video that tells a story - your story.

Text ads aren’t dead. But video is a powerful tool. 80% of the clues to any communication are picked up by sight - ask any sociologist. Most of the other 20% are picked up through sound clues. Your actual words offer the fewest clues. Therefore, it makes sense that, if you want to deliver an effective marketing communication, you’ll use video. But use video to enhance your text, not to replace it.

8. Nobody Ever Bored Anybody Into Buying
The vast majority of website text is boring, unimaginative and self-promoting. If you don’t present a compelling focused story then you are just wasting peoples’ time. Seduce your audience with an informative, entertaining, and memorable presentation created by marketing professionals.

This takes talent. Focus on your customer, not yourself.

9. Too Much of Good Thing, Isn’t So Good
You were worried about load times and search engine optimization so you dumped most of your images and multimedia and proceeded to put enough text on your site that would take a month to study; but have you considered whether anybody is ever going to actually read that stuff? And that’s assuming people could ever find what they were looking for in the first place.

This is just a clever sales pitch. Look, it’s all about content. Some websites can do well with a ton of text. Others need lots of graphic enhancement. Ask yourself this question: Who is my audience and what do they want?

10. Stop Hiding Behind Your Email Address
You’ve got a killer website. It tells visitors everything. All they have to do is place an order. But wait … somebody has a question. So they go to your contact page and find an email address. No contact name. No address and no phone number. You’ve provided a Q&A, an FAQ, and a list of technical specs. What more do they want? Well, what they want is to talk to somebody to make sure you’re legit and if they have a problem that you’ll stand behind what you’re selling. Silly them.

You should have your company name, address, phone number, e-mail, fax, your name and other pertinent contact information on your website. You have it on all of your other marketing materials, don’t you?

11. Do You Suffer From Redundant Redux Reflux?
Search engines love content. They index all your text, searching for keywords and phrases. So what do you do? You repeat and repeat stuff, over and over to make sure the search engines understand what you’re all about. To bad all your Web-visitors get indigestion from reading your redundant copy and leave because they forgot why they were there.

Don’t bore. Enlighten. Remember, you have human readers too. They’re more important than the search engines.

12. Inform. Enlighten. Persuade.
Knowledge is today’s high-value commodity. If you have a set of skills that people want to acquire, then you’ve got something to sell: something to build a business around. But if you don’t know how to present that knowledge to an audience, then your skills are unmarketable. If you want to get paid for what you know, you better find out how to deliver your content.

You might think this goes without saying, but there are too many websites out there that don’t do this effectively. You really have to use your website as a marketing tool. That’s what it is. Start with one question: What is the website’s purpose? Do you want it to be a lead generation tool, close sales, drive traffic to your blog, develop a mailing list? What are you using it for? Give it a purpose and make everything you do with it work toward that purpose.

13. It’s Not About Numbers; It’s About Quality
It’s not the number of hits you get on your website, it’s how long visitors stay on your site and how much information they retain after they leave that counts. It’s about the quality of traffic not the quantity. And the best way to create quality traffic is to provide easy to find, easy to understand, easy to remember content.

You want your visitors to do something when they get to your website. If they don’t buy today, you want them to sign up for your newsletter, download an e-book or do something. You want to be able to get back in touch with them.

14. Don’t Play Constant S.E.O. Catch-up
Every time an S.E.O. whiz kid comes up with a trick to beat the search engine algorithms, the experts at the search engines change their criteria. This means you’re constantly playing S.E.O. catch-up. Good for the whiz kid, not so good for you. And have you ever wondered how all those search engine optimizers can guarantee you, and everybody else they are selling, top billing - kind of hard to believe isn’t it?

Most so-called SEO experts are bilkers. They’re out to get your money. True SEO work is long-lasting. There are no tricks, only results. And if you aren’t getting results it doesn’t matter what tricks you use. If you hire someone who gets you good rankings today, then you fall in rankings tomorrow, fire your SEO expert and find a real professional who understands that SEO work is timeless.

15. Show Me What To Do
Anybody who has ever spent the night before Christmas trying to decipher the arcane instructions provided by the manufacturer of the bicycle you bought your kid, or the bizarre graphics included with the do-it-yourself kitchen you bought from ‘you know who’, knows that there is nothing like a good video to explain how Part A actually does fit into Part B.

Is this guy selling video services, or what? Actually, he has a good point, but you can do the same thing with diagrams and illustrations. You just have to make sure it’s all clear. If it isn’t, then you’re just wasting your time and the time of your customers.

16. Even Cows Have Brands
If you’ve got a business, you’ve got a brand. We’re not just talking about a logo. We’re talking about every thing you do: your website, your print collaterals, everything, including how you answer the phone. You do answer the phone don’t you? If your website design firm doesn’t get it, if they aren’t creating a brand personality, what are they doing?

Here’s a hint: Hire an Internet marketing company and make sure your Web design team works for them. Brand yourself. Everything you do online is about branding.

17. Lost In Space
Ever go to one of those websites that’s impossible to navigate. Maybe the navigation system doesn’t work in your favorite browser, or maybe the navigation system is so confusing visitors get lost in cyber-content-hell. Information architecture, how people find the content they are looking for, is critical to creating a satisfying user experience.

Duh. Your website is information. It’s all about how you package your content. Get it right.

18. You Can Have It Both Ways
Remember when your mother told you, you couldn’t have dessert if you didn’t finish your broccoli? Sounds like those know-it-all search engine gurus telling you that you can’t have multimedia on your site. Well you’re a big boy now, and if you want that multimedia hot fudge sundae you can have it. And you can also have all the good-for-you search engine friendly copy too. Who said you couldn’t have it both ways?

As I said earlier, use your graphics to enhance your text. Not the other way around.

No. 19 - Plan your site before you start it. Know what you want before you implement it. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself doing it again … and again … and again.

About The Author
Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design firm that specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads, www.136words.com and www.sonicpersonality.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246.

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